Search form

“Zero Tolerance.” Causes, Consequences, and Alternatives

Chairman Durbin, ranking minority member Graham, and members of
the Committee, thank you for inviting me to speak with you today.
My name is Andrew Coulson and I direct the Center for Educational
Freedom at the Cato Institute, a nonprofit, non-partisan public
policy research organization. My comments are my own, and do not
represent any position of the Institute.

Zero Tolerance policies, as practiced in school districts around
the country, are now widely ridiculed and condemned. Rightfully so.
Thoughtless and indiscriminate application of such policies has led
to members of high school baseball teams being expelled for having
baseball bats in their trunks, and to five-year-olds being expelled
from Kindergarten for making handgestures in the shape of
guns.1

As disciplinary referrals to the principal’s office have
increased, so has the frequency of outof- school suspensions. You
will hear from other speakers today the harm that these can do to
the suspended student. Fortunately, there are much better
discipline policies available to us, and I would like to begin my
testimony by describing one such hypothetical alternative:

Imagine a school district that resolved not to expel students or
use out-of-school suspensions. Instead, let’s say it vigorously and
consistently enforced a clear code of conduct, giving detentions
for small violations and in-school-suspensions for more
serious transgressions like starting fights.

These in-school-suspensions would assign a host of duties
intended to discourage repeat offenses and encourage civilized
behavior. Suspended students might write reflective essays about
their behavior and why it was inappropriate. They could be assigned
clean-up duties around the school. They could also be required to
write a letter of apology to their fellow classmates, teacher, and
principal, and this letter could be read out to the class or even
at a school assembly.

Since disruptive students are often behind academically, they
could be required to attend Saturday morning classes to help them
catch up. And as a way of illustrating that their behavior was
beneath the standards expected of students of their age, they might
be assigned to a different class at a lower grade level during the
period of their in-school suspension, and required to do all the
work assigned in that class.

The interesting thing about this hypothetical school district is
that it is not hypothetical and it is not a school district. The
policies I’ve just described are those that have been in place for
a decade at the American Indian Model charter schools, often
abbreviated as “AIM” schools. The name of this small network of
three charter schools is vestigial: the student body today is
primarily, South-East Asian, Hispanic, and black. Virtually all the
students qualify for free or reduced price lunches, and the schools
are all located in the heart of Oakland, California, one of the
most violent and crime-ridden cities in America.

Oakland’s Public School district has its own armed police force,
one of its elementary schools suspended 97 students for
acts of violence in a single recent year,2 and that
isn’t the district’s worst school. It’s typical for multiple
students to be shot each year, with several fatalities. Bullying
and fights on school grounds are a daily occurrence in the
district.

But the American Indian Charter Schools are different. I’ve
visited them, interviewed their students, teachers, and
administrators, and studied their academic achievement.3
This is what I’ve found:

The atmosphere at these schools is orderly and studious.
Attendance rates are around 99 percent. There are no metal
detectors and no on-campus police. Violence is almost unheard of.
The average number of fights across all three schools combined is
about 3 per year. Sixth grade teachers—those teaching
students experiencing the American Indian Model for the first
time— hand out detentions for any behavior that disrupts the
class. Talking with those younger middleschool students, it’s
obvious that many of them chafe at the relentlessness of the
schools’ discipline policy. They’re kids. It’s natural for them to
push the boundaries of what’s acceptable. But those same students
who roll their eyes at all the detentions their middle school hands
out, are quick to report how different their school is from the
district schools they recently left behind, and which many of their
friends still attend. They tell stories, in shocked and dismayed
voices, of the bullying, fighting, and drug-dealing that routinely
go on in the district schools, and they are very happy that these
things are incredibly rare at their AIM school.

By the time they reach high school, AIM students not only behave
with great maturity, they have excellent study habits and skills.
Teachers at the high school level spend virtually no time on
discipline. Because they don’t have to. They spend all their time
teaching. The students are self-motivated, and proud of their
academic success. And they are very academically successful. When I
studied the performance of all of California’s 68 charter school
networks last year, I found that AIM schools were the highest
performing by a wide margin. AIM students are just as far ahead of
students at the well-respected KIPP charter schools as KIPP
students are ahead of students at regular public schools. That is
after controlling for the race and socio-economic status of the
students, as well as peer effects. In fact, low-income Hispanic and
African American students at AIM schools outperform the state wide
average for wealthier white and Asian students.

Their entire graduating classes are generally accepted to
multiple 4 year colleges, often quite prestigious ones. I’ve
interviewed AIM school alumni currently attending or having
graduated from colleges like Berkeley and Dartmouth, I know a
number of others are currently enrolled at Stanford. The AIM model
shows that it is possible to design discipline policies vastly
better for students than the cavalier use of expulsions and
out-of-school suspensions. What’s more, there are ways of
systematically encouraging the adoption of similarly effective
discipline practices. And I will discuss those in a moment.

But it is also painfully clear that we are not there yet. Today,
policies like the ones in use at the AIM schools are rare
exceptions. So if of out-of-school suspensions were curtailed
tomorrow in districts like Oakland, they would not be instantly
replaced with highly effective alternatives. Knowing that, it is
crucial to ask: what would they be replaced with? What would happen
if principals facing extensive discipline problems in conventional
public schools suddenly curtailed their use of out-of-school
suspensions?

That’s not a rhetorical question. In fact, it has already been
answered in a forthcoming study in the journal International
Economics Review.4 In that study, Rochester
University professor Joshua Kinsler discovered that cutting
out-of-school suspensions in schools with many disruptive students
lowers overall student achievement.

Why is that? As we know, out of school suspensions do no good
for the suspended student academically, but Kinsler found that they
do appear to benefit the rest of the school, presumably by making
it easier for teachers to teach the non-disruptive children.

Professor Kinsler’s findings reminded me of an essay I came
across recently, dealing with school violence. It reflects on
bullying suffered by the author when he was a boy, and how it was
dealt with by his school. I’d like to share a brief quote with
you:

It was hard that school year…. I look back at those fights and
how the principals… separated us and wanted to know who started
it…. They wanted to know if someone was a bully…. And…The
bully was disciplined.

Zero Tolerance policies as applied in most schools today punish
both kids for fighting, and oftentimes there are no inquiries into
whether it was mutual combat or a primary aggressor situation…. A
Zero Tolerance attitude among school administrators runs the risk
of punishing the victim as well as the bully. “It runs the risk of
becoming blind to the evils of bullying.”

Zero Tolerance policies are contrary to our fundamental right to
self-defense…. many kids are assaulted in schools every day and
punished for fighting back, or in fear of being punished do not
fight back and are beaten.5

These reflections were written by Judge Teske. He makes an
eloquent case that adults in our school and justice systems must
defend innocent children from bullies. His argument is compelling,
and it applies just as much to children’s education as to their
physical safety.

Yes, out-of-school suspensions are far from the ideal
disciplinary strategy. But until superior strategies, like those of
the AIM model, have been widely adopted, curtailing out-of-school
suspensions will likely have the perverse result of compromising
the education of millions of innocent children.

There is a bitter irony here. A key concern with Zero Tolerance
policies is the harm they do to African American children, because
African American students are more likely to be referred to the
principal’s office and, as a result, more likely to be suspended.
But only a small fraction of black students are actually suspended.
The vast majority are not disruptive. They are simply trying to get
an education. They are, like the victims of bullying described by
Judge Teske, innocent. What Kinsler’s research shows, is that in
public schools with discipline problems, it hurts those innocent
African American children academically to keep disruptive students
in the classroom. According to Kinsler’s findings, significantly
cutting out-of-school suspensions in those schools widens
the black-white academic achievement gap.

Clearly we must find a better solution. The existence of highly
successful disciplinary and academic models like the American
Indian charter schools in Oakland proves that we can do better. The
challenge is to figure out why such successful models are so rare
today, and how we can replicate them.

Those are tough questions, and there isn’t the time or space in
this testimony to do them justice, but let me share two points that
I think help to point the way forward. First, ask yourselves why
the nation’s public schools have so widely adopted such
badly-designed Zero Tolerance policies? An especially clear answer
to that question comes from an Associated Press story from 2001,
back when public school officials still vividly remembered the
years before Zero Tolerance became widespread. Let me quote to you
briefly from that article:

The policies came about partly because schools faced lawsuits
charging that principals disciplined unequally based on race or
other factors, [school superintendent Tony] Arasi said.

Having a universal policy on paper protects schools from lawsuits
by eliminating a lot of the arbitrary nature of school discipline,
he said.
“Those people saying Zero Tolerance leads to unfairness in
serious discipline may want to go back 10 or 15 years to before
most districts had Zero Tolerance,” Arasi said. “They
were saying there was unfairness then come full circle.”

Once in place, the policies also help protect against lawsuits from
parents charging the school did not do enough to keep students
safe, or from complaints that individual punishments did not fit
the offense.6

Today, Zero Tolerance policies are faulted for applying
discipline rules blindly and mechanically, with no consideration
for extenuating circumstances. But that is precisely why those
policies were adopted in the first place. Prior to their adoption,
education officials at every level of government were inundated
with lawsuits and complaints of disciplinary bias. Elected
officials were pressured to do something. Officials sought to
reduce this flood of lawsuits and complaints by automatically
ejecting students for violating the letter of a Zero Tolerance
policy.

In short, they adopted these policies because it seemed in their
own interests to do so—not because they thought it was in the
interests of students. I don’t say that to fault these officials.
They were people just like the rest of us, and they were influenced
by the incentives of their workplace, just as we all are. It would
be unrealistic to expect otherwise. If we want better policies to
be adopted, we have to change the incentives in the system. For
instance, consider a system in which administrators who keep more
students in school, maintain orderly classrooms, and achieve higher
graduation rates are recognized and rewarded for their
achievements. What if administrators’ and teachers’ job security
and pay were tied to these desirable outcomes?

My second observation on the way forward begins with a question.
What kind of school is most likely to implement a successful
discipline policy? As you can imagine, a lot of factors are
involved, but there’s good evidence that a cornerstone of these
successful schools is consistency. When students understand that
the expectations for their behavior are the same from grade to
grade and from classroom to classroom, that everyone in the school
is on the same page, it has been shown to lead to more studious,
orderly schools.7 Consistency is a hallmark of
discipline policy at the American Indian Model schools.

Wonderful as it is to know that, it begs the further question:
how do you cultivate such consistency and build a strong sense of
shared mission and understanding among school staff. There’s
actually good evidence on this question as well, reaching back
decades. One study, published in the journal Sociology of
Education, compared the attitudes of teachers in two different
groups of schools.8 Their results are reported in Figure
1, and reveal that teachers in Group A schools were substantially
more positive about their school’s atmosphere in every one of the
nine areas measured.

Essentially identical results were found by Harvard sociologist
Susan Moore Johnson, who studied a different set of schools, but
also ones falling in Group A or Group B.9 Professor
Johnson reported that teachers in Group A schools consistently
“expressed clearer notions of their schools’ goals and purposes;
they identified the values that they shared with others in the
schools’ they explained how these understandings were grounded in
their schools’ histories and were reinforced and expressed in their
traditions.” Group B teachers, she found, were “offend perplexed”
by the same questions about their schools’ culture and values. A
typical Group B teacher responded that his school “probably does
have some unifying culture and I’m just not aware of it.”
Apparently not seeing the irony in that statement.

Here’s how professor Johnson summed up her findings:

The prominence of cultural bonds in [Group A] schools aand their
virtual absence in most [Group B] schools can be ex plained by
differences in their organizations. Because [Group A] schools are
typically independent, small, stable, and homogeneous, those who
work in them can better agree on goals, champion hardy values,
celebrate successes, [and] find direction in their history….
[Group B] schools, by comparison, are… embedded in…
bureaucracies… [and] are subject to frequent and wholesale
changes in membership.

Neither of the soociological studies I’ve mentioned attributed
the differences between Grroup A and Grroup B schools to the
students they served. Instead, they attributed them to the
organizational structure of those schools. As some of you have no
doubt already guessed, what I’ve called Group A and Group B are in
fact private and public schools.

For decades, education economists have reported findings
consistent with those of their sociologist colleagues. Controlling
for student and family background, graduation and college
acceptance rates are higher in independent schools than in public
schools, whereas crime rates are lower—especially for urban
African American students.10 The District of Columbia’s
own school voucher program, overseen by Congress, has a
significantly higher graduation rate than the district’s
vastly-higher-spending public schools.

From a policy standpoint, these findings are problematic. Under
our present system, the people with the least access to independent
schools are low-income families—precisely those who are more
likely to live in higher crime neighborhoods with troubled public
schools; the very people most desperately in need of better, safer
alternatives.

I do not present this evidence to encourage Congress to enact
nation-wide private school choice legislation. Even if the
Constitution permitted such a program, which it does not, evidence
from other nations suggests it would be more effective to implement
such policies at the state level. But Congress can encourage the
adoption of such state-level programs by virtue of the public
prominence of its Senators and Representatives. Congress can also
nurture and expand the DC Opportunity Scholarship program, as an
example to states of what is possible. And above all, Congress can
avoid instituting new regulations and programs that would impede
states’ efforts to bring safe, responsive independent schools
within reach of all children, and can discontinue federal programs
that have proven themselves ineffective and that consume funds that
could more effectively be spent by the states and the people.